


or so i recall

by LookingForShadows



Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-17 23:32:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15472551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForShadows/pseuds/LookingForShadows
Summary: As her memories return, Anya pieces together what she knew of Anastasia with what she knows now.





	or so i recall

**Author's Note:**

> An attempt to reconcile my love for the real Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna and her family, and my love for musicals.

_i. NO!_

It was so simple: a car backfiring. Something heard all the time. And it sounded so much like being there, like being with Tatiana and Marie and Alexei…

The car backfiring sounded like guns, and the guns sounded like the ones the guards had used in that horrid cellar. And of the cellar, she heard screams. Not dear Papa: he went quickly, they hated him so and they put him out of his misery first. Not Mama either, nor even Olga: they had barely time to begin crossing themselves before the guns fired into their skulls.

It was Tatiana, who had always been the governess, bossing them all around.

It was Marie, her other half of their Little Pair, so sweet and wanting only a quiet future for her happiness.

It was Alexei, who could be demanding like Tatiana but endured so much pain in his short life and was the kinder for it, pulling through every time by the grace of God, for Russia.

And yet she heard their screams when Russia had killed them, every time she heard a car backfire.

It took her getting her memories back to remember who was screaming.

 

_ii. yusupov’s private theater_

When her cousin Irina got married to Felix Yusupov, there were celebrations for what seemed like ages. There had been a play, though now it had been too many years to remember what it was, but she could remember it more clearly now—

Well, she could remember eating chocolates in the theater’s imperial box and forgetting to take her elbow-length gloves off. Olga gave her horrified glances, but she had Alexei at her side, reaching over to take another chocolate. What was she supposed to do, just let him have it?

Alexei may have been her best friend as well as her beloved little brother, but she wasn’t going to share her chocolate, even with him.

 

_iii. you were born in a palace by the sea_

Peterhof was lovely in her memories, but it was Livadia that truly glittered. They didn’t have as many days there as in Tsarskoe Selo—their overall days were numbered—but everyone was so much happier there. It was an oasis for Mama, with all her worries and ailments, and Alexei, who never seemed to get sick at Livadia.

Sometimes, if she closed her eyes, she could still smell the salty breeze and hear Papa calling her for a game of tennis.

 

 _iv. your hand receives a kiss!_  

Well, it did—technically. But she hated that part. Her hands were so ugly, something the little Greek cousins always teased her about. So she clasped her hands behind her back and kept them out of sight, even though there was no chance now of ever having her hands kissed by anyone but Dmitry.

 

_v. your great-aunt olga, how she frolicked on the volga!_

Now, after her memories had returned, Anya had to laugh at the idea of Greek Aunt Olga, her grandmother’s sister-in-law, ever frolicking. Old Aunt Olga, as they had called her, had been cheerful and sweet but certainly not one to ever _frolic_.

Oh, Vlad. He had tried so hard to remember all the different people, but at that particular mistake, she had to laugh.

 

 _vi._   _un peu_

When she spoke French, a face floated in her mind. Thin, and a little stern, with a thin, long mustache stiffly waxed. Kindness, her brain supplied. Someone who cared for her, who had been kind to her, had spoken French with her.

It was only after she started to recover her memories that she put a name to it: Monsieur Gilliard, her French tutor.

 

_vii. sewn in my underclothes_

Mama called them “the medicines”; that was their code in the family. At the governor’s mansion in Tobolsk, they spent hours quietly picking apart the seams in corsets, petticoats, and chemises and sewing them back together with smuggled diamonds in the lining. It was how she had lived: the bullets and the soldiers’ bayonets ricocheted off the diamonds.

There were other bullets that had made their way to her skin, but it was easier not to think about those or the scars they had left.

 

_viii. paris via budapest_

The train conductor’s voice called out their destination and something sang in Anya. Budapest—she knew it sounded familiar, so familiar, but why...

“It’s in Hungary,” Vlad said when she asked later. “But you are not related to the imperial family there. The Habsburgs, they are all Catholic. And such ugly chins!”

Hungary, no, that wasn’t it. The city, though, sounded like mischief and warmth, glamour and laughter. . .

Months later, she realized what it was: Bucharest, not Budapest. She was thinking of Aunt Missy—a cousin of both Mama and Papa—who had wanted her son Carol to marry Olga, and who had been so generous with these five little Romanov cousins she barely knew. Aunt Missy, of course, was also queen of Romania.

Bucharest, Romania; not Budapest, Hungary.

 

_ix. except russia is more beautiful_

It had been drilled into her from the time she could hear: Russia was the most beautiful place of all. 

Russia was vast. It stretched from the dense wooded forests of Poland to the frozen, lifeless tundras of Siberia, down to the shimmering blue sea of the Crimea, and for thousands of miles to the east, in places she had never seen. But all of it was beautiful.

All of it was _home_.

It hurt to see it go.


End file.
